Three Mile Island, 1979
A stuck pilot valve. A misread indicator. A partial melt.
- 04:00 — pilot-operated relief valve sticks open
- 04:02 — operators believe coolant is adequate
- 06:00 — core partially uncovered, ~45% melt
- + 14y — cleanup cost: US $1 B
GENPATSU.QUEST is an interactive briefing room. You will not operate a reactor — you will feel why operating one is a civilisational bet. Every dial here is real physics, slowed down until you can see it tremble.
Five nested barriers between fuel and biosphere. Hover to strip them away.
Historical signal, not entertainment. Each deck is drawn from post-incident literature.
A stuck pilot valve. A misread indicator. A partial melt.
A late-night safety test. A positive void coefficient. A graphite sky.
A 15-metre wave. Flooded diesels. A week of improvisation.
One control rod. Withdrawn 51 cm by hand. Three dead in milliseconds.
Move the sliders. Watch the margin. The sliders are easy. Staying in the green is not.
→ Reactor operators train on simulators like this for 2,000 hours before touching real rods.
Not a duration. A sentence served in geological time.
Click to unfold. Nuclear jargon translated to plain metaphor.
The moment when, on average, exactly one neutron from each fission causes the next fission. Not an explosion — a steady, self-sustaining whisper. Anything more is supercritical; anything less, subcritical.
Even after a reactor is shut down, fission products keep decaying — giving off ~6% of full power for minutes, ~1% for days. You cannot turn it off. You can only cool it.
Loss of off-site power and all emergency diesels. The scenario that haunts every operator: the plant is an animal that must breathe. Nine minutes of batteries is not breathing.
A unit of biological radiation dose. 1 mSv/yr is roughly the global background. 100 mSv short-term is where measurable cancer risk begins. 5 Sv in a day is a coin flip for your life.
How reactor power changes when coolant turns to steam. Negative (most Western designs) = steam shuts it down. Positive (early RBMK) = steam makes it worse. One sign flip rewrote the 20th century.
Emergency insertion of all control rods, usually in under three seconds. The name likely comes from Fermi's Chicago Pile: "Safety Control Rod Axe Man" — a real person with a real rope and a real axe.